Golden Open Acrylic Sets

Golden Open Acrylics offer an escape from the studio, allowing acrylic artists to experience the warm sun and fresh spring breeze of plein air painting.

This is a professional line of colors and mediums formulated with a unique, relaxed set of working properties that stay wet longer, even in outdoor conditions. Their versatility allows artists to explore a wider range of techniques that rely on softening, shading, glazing, and creating fine detail.

Open Acrylics remain wet on the palette for extended periods of time. This means that color mixes are usable longer, resulting in less waste. Their remarkable working time makes them an ideal choice for many techniques, including plein air painting, portraiture, monoprinting, and screenprinting. They may be used with natural fiber brushes, and also work well with more traditional painting techniques.

These sets offer a fantastic way to experiment with this exciting line of acrylics.

Landscape Set — The long open time of Golden Open Acrylics makes them particularly suitable for plein air painting, and this Landscape Set starts you off with an ideal outdoor palette. It includes 0.75 oz (22 ml) tubes of Cadmium Yellow Primrose, Yellow Ochre, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red Light, Ultramarine Blue, Manganese Blue Hue, and Sap Green Hue, plus a 2 oz tube of Titanium White and a 1 oz bottle of Open Thinner.

GREAT for Gelli printing! The "open" quality allows much more time for working with the paints, and planning out the print design. There is no need to add a glazing or 'open' medium, therefore the pigment is undiminished, and the prints are more vibrant. Wonderful stuff!

I bought Golden Open paints based on their ads and reviews and mostly I was sold on an idea that you can use them as an oil paint and that they don't dry fast - it is to me not true at all - they got sticky really fast and I did not notice any big difference with standard fast drying acrylics. I could not use them for blending any better than using common acrylics with just adding a bit more water or flow medium.Not satisfied with the product and think I will never buy them again...

The price of this product compared to similar, competitive alternatives is:

Average

Bottom LineNo, I would not recommend this to a friend

Merchant response: Thank you for sharing your feedback. While Open acrylics offer longer working times, they are not intended to mimic the working properties of oil paints. Use of water, or other non-Open mediums will further diminish the properties. For best results, we recommend using Open mediums and thinners.

Have given it five stars but am pretty much of a novice painter and cannot really say anything other than I am very happy with the product and at my novice level would be hard put to find anything better. Also, the service, as always from Blick, is great.

These feel very different on canvas as opposed to paper or other more porous surfaces. I've been doing some acrylic illustrations on gessoed bristol, and they only stay workable on that surface slightly longer than regular acrylics. They are completely different on canvas though. On canvas they truly feel like oil. They can also be mixed with regular acrylics, and the medium can also be mixed with regular acrylics. With those blends, the dry time varies. With the OPEN colors and medium alone, on canvas, I've had the longest dry times. It blends more like oil and is workable for quite a while, depending on how thick you paint. I tend to be a thin-layer, glaze-y kind of painter, so I find my layers are totally dry by morning. Be aware, however, that within a shorter time frame (not overnight) sometimes thin layers will feel dry to the touch, but can become workable again when re-wetted. This can be good if you want to blend an area, or a drawback if you want to go to a new layer and didn't intend to disturb what was underneath. Overall I love these and plan to expand my collection of them. They fill in the blank in that frustration between "I can't blend these acrylics because they dry too fast" and "This oil painting is eternally sticky." Brings back that wonderful feeling of painting with oils but without the stinky chemical nastiness.

I am in the process of refurbishing a plywood-mounted nativity scene for my church and decided that acrylics would be best for my purpose. After struggling with flesh tones on several of the pieces, a friend suggested Golden Open acrylics for their slower drying times and greater capacity for blending. They have worked wonderfully.

I have never painted with oils but this is the closest acrylic you can use. First impressions are that it is stickier than regular acrylics. This means longer dry times which I appreciate. They are easy to blend and layer. You can easily wipe away areas to reveal layers underneath. I use a damp rag. Fun to use.

I tried switching to one of the water miscible paints and reallydidn't care for it. The thing I like about Golden Opens is the nosmell aspect. The only one thing is you can't apply too thick. Lessthan the thickness of a dime or it won't dry. Other than that youcan blend these colors nicely. I would consider myself an intermediatepainter. I do landscapes. Buy their thinning medium. Overnight andyou are dry. I believe I will be staying with Goldens now. Theseare just not like regular acrylics. Recently I left my brush accidently on the palette for a couple days and said to myself guessI will be throwing this one away. To my surprise I brought it to thesink and a bit of warm water and soap. Voila! Cleaned up. No they are not going to feel exactly like oils. I think the trade-offs are balanced in their favor though. You can seal you painting(and should) with Golden Acrylic Polymer Varnishes.My 2 cents.

As a lifelong oil painter, I had been seeking ways to speed dry time due to new deadlines. It had been suggested to me that I switch to acrylics. I was hesitant because acrylic dry time was TOO fast and the colors and luminosity were not as deep and rich, but I found that Golden open acrylics are a perfect product because the dry time is faster than oil but slow enough to achieve blending and wet-into-wet passages. The pigments are deep and high-quality and with acrylic glazing mediums you can achieve the same glazing results as oil. For any oil painter looking to make the switch, I highly recommend it!

What makes Golden Open Acrylics different from traditional acrylics? These artist quality Open paints allow for wet-on-wet techniques and a more relaxed approach to acrylic painting, similar to that of oil painting.

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